Jeffrey Skoll

The first employee and first President of internet auction firm eBay, Skoll is a Canadian-born engineer and internet entrepreneur living in Los Angeles, California, with an estimated net worth of $US 3.2 billion (as of March 2011). He has been ranked by Forbes as the 7th wealthiest Canadian and 347th in the world. Skoll used the wealth eBay gave him to become a philanthropist and to found the independent movie production company Participant Media.

He was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada into a Jewish family, and they settled in Toronto in the late seventies. He graduated with a BASc with honors in 1987 from the University of Toronto's electrical engineering program. While an undergraduate student, Skoll co-edited the engineering students' satirical newspaper The Toike Oike. He paid his way through college by pumping gas in North York, Ontario.

After graduating he backpacked around the world for several months before returning and founding two businesses in Toronto: Skoll Engineering, an information technology consulting firm, and Micros on the Move Ltd., a computer rental firm. He left Canada in 1993 to study a Masters of Business Administration at Stanford Business School, graduating in 1995. After Stanford he went to work at Knight-Ridder, where he worked on internet projects for the publishing company.

In 1996 he met eBay's founder Pierre Omidyar, who hired him as the company's first President and first full-time employee. While eBay was already profitable at the time he joined, Skoll wrote the business plan that eBay followed from its emergence as a start-up to a great success. He remained President until the arrival of Meg Whitman in January 1998, when he became Vice President, Strategic Planning and Analysis until back problems necessitated his departure from full-time employment at the company. In 1998, he championed the creation of the eBay Foundation, which was allocated pre-IPO stock now worth $32 million.

Once eBay's second largest stockholder, behind Omidyar, Skoll subsequently cashed out a portion of his company holdings, yielding him around $2 billion. Having been a keen reader as a boy, influenced by authors such as Aldous Huxley and Ayn Rand, he had intended to become an author writing motivational books and books on tackling the world's problems. In line with his goals, he became the founder, chairman, and owner of Participant Media (formerly Participant Productions), a Los Angeles based media company he created to fund feature films and documentaries that promote social values while still being commercially viable. The company also has publishing and television divisions, and operates Takepart.com, an online site catering to social activists.